So, I’m a little late to the After Lives party. I usually am to these things. But this book merits uninterrupted attention. It is — like so many of Gurnah’s novels — utterly amazing, and so deserving of the accolades it has received. After Lives is one of those novels that gets into your marrow, a book that I think everyone should read once (at least).
For me, the novel also allowed me a glimpse into East African lives: the complexity of religion and gendered ideas of what is right and wrong, the ways in which women and men view themselves and their role in their communities in this moment in time. I love African literature set in this time period. Readers of Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’O, and Buchi Emecheta are going to love any of Gurnah’s work. It is a continuation of that lineage.
The novel spans a lifetime, marks the transition of one generation to another, a momentous (and dark) epoch in our global history. The novel revolves around German imperialism in East Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century, but it is not about the colonizers: it is about those who were colonized, those who survived it, lived it, lived through it. European colonization is the background noise — noisy as it is — but the lives of those who lived it is what shines through. In this sense, After Lives is the novel that epitomizes Postcolonial literature: it is empowering, even as it acknowledges and confronts the trauma of European imperialism. It relegates imperialism to the sidelines of the story, even as it is clear those events created the stage on which the story plays out in the first place.
Gurnah is brilliant in their delivery of this reversal of focus.
The story revolves around a young woman whose life is torn apart and rebuilt as a result of German and British imperialism in the region; but she — and those whose lives touch hers — are not merely pawns in the Scramble for Africa. Religion, tradition, love, marriage, gendered expectations and desires, and family are stronger factors which shape her experience of this moment under those global geopolitical pressures. The reader is drawn into her life as she — and her family and friends and community — must navigate these intersecting and interlocking influences to find happiness and a path for themselves.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 